Backlash Against IP Bill Requiring ISPs to Block Pirate Sites

Tech groups and other Internet stakeholders this week expressed concern with a pending copyright bill that would allow the U.S. government to seize domains with infringing content and require ISPs to cut off connections with the offending sites.

Tech groups and other Internet stakeholders this week expressed concern with a pending copyright bill that would allow the U.S. government to seize domains with infringing content and require ISPs to cut off connections with the offending sites.

The bill, introduced last week by Sen. Patrick Leahy, is "unprecedented in the U.S.," Leslie Harris, president and chief executive of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), said in a Tuesday call with reporters. It tackles a topic that "requires enormous caution and a very deliberative process."

Specifically, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) would allow the Department of Justice to obtain an injunction and seize the domain name of a site found to offer pirated goods  like music streams or movie downloads. It would go one step further, however, and require U.S. ISPs to cut off contact with these domains.

The inclusion of the ISPs is among CDT's top concerns, said John Morris, CDT's general counsel. "Once you start asking the ISPs to take a new role as enforcers against improper content, it is very hard to see where that stops," he said.

Adding ISPs to the equation is essentially just "roping the intermediaries into the proceedings," Morris said.

In addition, if the U.S. takes this step, other countries will likely follow suit, and some will potentially impose more pernicious provisions than the U.S. law. "Ultimately, this could really lead to the increased balkanization of the Internet," Morris said.

Cynthia Wong, director of global Internet freedom at CDT, agreed. "What the U.S. does domestically really does set a precedent for other countries," she said.

The bill also raises some free speech concerns, CDT said. If a domain is seized or Web site blocked  even if that site contains infringing content  there's "almost no doubt there will be some lawful speech on the site that will be blocked," Morris said.

He likened the debate to the 1963 Supreme Court decision in Bantam Books vs. Sullivan. In that case, a Rhode Island commission created a blacklist of supposedly pornographic magazines, which the Supreme Court found was unlawful.

"The Supreme Court made it very clear that the kind of blacklist the [Leahy] bill proposes is blatantly unconstitutional," Morris said.

When asked if there was any approach CDT might support, Harris said the group was just "very worried about domain names as an approach." She acknowledged that Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, "really did the best he could under the circumstances" and had made some changes since the bill circulated in draft form, but "we just cannot get to the point of believing that launching these new and novel approaches without any serious conversation about all these other implications makes sense."

Also on Tuesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) posted a letter that 87 Internet engineers wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee expressing their opposition.

"If enacted, this legislation will risk fragmenting the Internet's global domain name system (DNS), create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure," according to the letter, which was signed by Steve Bellovin, one of USENET's founders, among others.

"We can't have a free and open Internet without a global domain name system that sits above the political concerns and objectives of any one government or industry," they wrote.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which includes Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo among its members, said in a blog post that while stopping piracy is a good goal, the bill "mirrors the Internet filtering and censoring systems the United States is fighting around the world  in countries like Thailand, Iran and China."

Meanwhile, Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit.com and now director of Demand Progress, has set up an online petition opposing the bill.

The Senate Judiciary Committee was initially scheduled to tackle the bill on Thursday morning, but the Senate might adjourn for the midterm election before that happens.

CDT's Morris said it was unclear why law enforcement really needs these additional powers. "We actually think that there are other ways for law enforcement to get access to the information they need," he said. "Basically most communications on the Internet are fairly open." He pointed to instant messages, e-mails, or Skype conversations. "It's relatively easy to burst out the packets and figure out what the target is doing."

The larger concern with the wiretap plan, he said, is that it might stifle innovation on the Web. Large phone companies have spent millions in order for their systems to be wiretap-friendly, Morris said, but smaller Web companies probably can't afford that.

"To suggest that those individual innovators or tiny Web sites would need to go get FBI approval and have a design review and hire lawyers and lobbyists in Washington to get their technology approved [as wiretap-friendly] before they can even deploy it at all is really a very curious attack on the entire way that technology has developed on the Internet," he said.

"We think it would seriously harm innovation and competition for communication technologies online, so we're very, very concerned about it," Morris concluded.

Chloe Albanesius has been with PCMag.com since April 2007, most recently as Executive Editor for News and Features. Prior to that, she worked for a year covering financial IT on Wall Street for Incisive Media. From 2002 to 2005, Chloe covered technology policy for The National Journal's Technology Daily in Washington, DC. She has held internships at NBC's Meet the Press, washingtonpost.com, the Tate Gallery press office in London, Roll Call, and Congressional Quarterly. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in journalism from American University...
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